Tag: Docudharma Times

This is an Open Thread: Eat All That You Want!

Thanksgiving Headlines: Young Coach Aids Rebuilding at New Orleans :If Not First in Time, First in the Country’s Heart: Immigrant Paper Work Backs Up At DHS: Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.

USA

Young Coach Aids Rebuilding at New Orleans

By JERÉ LONGMAN

Published: November 22, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 21 – On the morning of July 6, Buzz Williams resigned as the men’s basketball coach at the University of New Orleans after one season.

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Hours later, the athletic director, Jim Miller, got a call from Joe Pasternack, who had been passed over when Williams was hired.

“What are you doing the next four years?” Miller asked.

Three days later, the 30-year-old Pasternack was hired, and he is now running the latest post-Katrina reclamation project in New Orleans.

The Privateers are playing for their third coach in three seasons. Their home court, Lakefront Arena, is still not restored, so the team will play another season in a glorified high school gym on campus. A makeshift dressing area has been fashioned in a hall intended for gymnastics, with blue drapes shielding the lockers and cardboard slats duct-taped over the windows for privacy.

This is an Open Thread: Free Thinking Zone

U.N. steeply lowers its AIDS estimates ,A gap in GOP candidates’ healthcare proposals ,Audit Finds Misuse of $34 Million student Loan Subsidy,  Radiation Detectors for Border Are Delayed Again, US plans case against AP photographer

U.N. steeply lowers its AIDS estimates

By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

November 20, 2007

The United Nations on Monday radically lowered years of estimates of the number of people worldwide infected by the AIDS virus, revealing that the growth of the AIDS pandemic is waning for the first time since HIV was discovered 26 years ago.

The revised figures, which were the result of much more sophisticated sampling techniques, indicate that the number of new infections peaked in 1998 and the number of deaths peaked in 2005.

USA

A gap in GOP candidates’ healthcare proposals

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — When Rudolph W. Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 2000, one thing he did not have to worry about was a lack of medical insurance.

Today, the former New York mayor joins two other cancer survivors in seeking the Republican presidential nomination: Arizona Sen. John McCain has been treated for melanoma, the most serious type of skin malignancy, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson had lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

This is an Open Thread: Where amusing stories are told

Monday’s Headlines, Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis, Giuliani Hoping NASCAR Fans May Provide an Edge in the Race, Vote nears for ID card plan in S.F., Powell: Iran far from nuclear weapon, Court begins Musharraf rule deliberations

Challenges to Musharraf rejected

Pakistan’s reshaped Supreme Court has dismissed the main challenges to Gen Pervez Musharraf being allowed a second term as president.

He has promised to resign as head of the army after the court validates his victory in October’s presidency poll.

He sacked a number of independently-minded judges who had been due to consider the case.

USA

Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis

For more than three months, as turmoil in the credit market has swept wildly through Wall Street, one mighty investment bank after another has been brought to its knees, leveled by multibillion-dollar blows to their bottom lines.

And then there is Goldman Sachs.

Rarely on Wall Street, where money travels in herds, has one firm gotten it so right when nearly everyone else was getting it so wrong. So far, three banking chief executives have been forced to resign after the debacle, and the pay for nearly all the survivors is expected to be cut deeply.

This is an Open Thread: Talking Backwards is OK

Sunday’s Headlines, FBI’s Forensic Test Full of Holes, Court rejects challenge to warrantless wiretaps,’Safe’ uranium that left a town contaminated,

USA

FBI’s Forensic Test Full of Holes

Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.

By John Solomon

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page A01

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” has found.

This is an Open Thread: Speed Talking is Allowed

Saturdays headlines, Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby, Petraeus Helping Pick New Generals, Writers, studios to resume talks ,Concern delayed the case against Bonds, US air assault targets militants in Iraq, Hamas warns Abbas: No peace concessions, Roma welcome anti-segregation ruling, Venezuela ‘attacked Guyana boats’, Okinawa’s war time wounds reopened, Monitors to miss Russian poll after Moscow fails to give visas, Musharraf defends democratic aims ahead of US talks, Restaurant is toast of the prison that held Mandela, Black Zimbabweans rally for white farms

Reports: 2,000 killed by cyclone

DHAKA, Bangladesh (CNN) — More than 900 bodies have been recovered in Bangladesh following a devastating tropical cyclone, but local news reports put the death toll at more than double that figure.

As flood waters recede, aid workers say they expect to find scores more bodies when remote villages are finally reached and the counting is done. They face debris-blocked roads, no electricity and almost nonexistent communications.

In addition to the dead, another 15,000 were hurt and 1,000 people were missing, according to a relief official.

U.N. says it’s time to adapt to warming

In the final installment of its landmark report, the climate-change panel says many countries will just have to learn to live with the effects.

By Alan Zarembo and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

November 17, 2007

The United Nations’ Nobel Prize-winning panel on climate change approved the final installment of its landmark report on global warming on Friday, concluding that even the best efforts at reducing CO2 levels will not be enough and that the world must also focus on adapting to “abrupt and irreversible” climate changes.

New and stronger evidence developed in the last year also suggests that many of the risks cited in the panel’s first three reports earlier this year will actually be larger than projected and will occur at lower temperatures, according to a draft of the so-called synthesis report.

USA

Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

This is an Open Thread: The debate starts now

Headlines, Calif. Court Rejects SUV Mileage Rules, Scientists Fault Climate Exhibit Changes, Poor Are Lagging in Hurricane Aid From Mississippi, Two Koreas agree rail timetable, U.S. to urge compromise in Pakistan, Balibo Five deliberately killed: coroner, A ‘battlefield of the mind’ in Iraq, Jordan’s Islamists Seek Offices Their Allies Scorn, Cypriot seeks to unravel curse with pants and egg, Powerful quake on Peru-Ecuador border, UN criticises Rio police killings, Hundreds of Nigerian robbers shot

Officials: Bangladesh cyclone kills at least 242 and some 650,000 others displaced by the storm, which is packing 150 mph winds and expected to cause severe flooding.

DHAKA, Bangladesh – A cyclone that slammed into Bangladesh’s coast with 140 mph winds killed at least 242 people, leveled homes and forced the evacuation of 650,000 villagers before heading inland and losing power Friday, officials said.

Tropical Cyclone Sidr roared across the country’s southwestern coast late Thursday with driving rain and high waves. The storm left about 242 villagers dead from falling debris, said Nahid Sultana, an official at a cyclone control room in Dhaka.

This is an Open Thread: Flipping and Flopping is OK

Headlines, U.S. Is Looking Past Musharraf in Case He Falls, Bomb Parts Clear Air Security in Tests, LAPD’s Muslim mapping plan killed, Russian workers point to oil as the problem, Brown unveils anti-terrorism strategy, A Top Rival in Pakistan Is Carted Off by the Police, Working through Korean unification blues,Iran official charged with spying, Palestinians aim for agreement with Israel within year,

USA

U.S. Is Looking Past Musharraf in Case He Falls

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 – Almost two weeks into Pakistan’s political crisis, Bush administration officials are losing faith that the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can survive in office and have begun discussing what might come next, according to senior administration officials.

In meetings on Wednesday, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon huddled to decide what message Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte would deliver to General Musharraf – and perhaps more important, to Pakistan’s generals – when he arrives in Islamabad on Friday.

This is an Open Thread: No hidden fees

Todays Headlines, ‘Hidden Costs’ Double Price Of Two Wars, Sticky issues for Coast Guard, Chalabi returns to prominence and power, Bhutto Put Under House Arrest, Panel Decries Terrorism Blacklist Process, Airline websites ‘are misleading’, The ANC is not known for its fondness of multinationals, plight of Zimbabwean refugees, Japan’s Leader Cites Limits In Global Security Abilities, Vietnam struggles with new flood disaster

USA

‘Hidden Costs’ Double Price Of Two Wars, Democrats Say

By Josh White

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, November 13, 2007; Page A14

The economic costs to the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far total approximately $1.5 trillion, according to a new study by congressional Democrats that estimates the conflicts’ “hidden costs”– including higher oil prices, the expense of treating wounded veterans and interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars.

Todays Headlines, Security Guard Fires From Convoy, Killing Iraqi Driver, A New Channel for Soft Money Starts Flowing, ‘I’ll Sell My Soul to the Devil’, 19,500 U.S. prisoners could get early release, Hurdles Stall Plan For Iraqi Recruits, Inside The Greenzone ,China Cracks Down On Critical Journalist

USA

Security Guard Fires From Convoy, Killing Iraqi Driver

Witnesses said that a taxi driver who was shot and killed by a guard with DynCorp International, a private security company, had posed no threat.